I need some help or information here because I’m afraid The Night Writer might get stolen away — well, in the night.
When I started blogging I registered my domain name with Registerfly for a nominal fee. I renewed the registration a year later with no problem. Again this year I received emails from Registerfly warning that my annual renewal was coming up. I renewed the domain name one day before the expiration and paid through PayPal which sent me a confirmation.
I then received an email from Registerfly that it wasn’t able to renew my domain. I figured it must have been a glitch in the ordering process, and went back to their site to try it again. This time I got an on-screen message saying that they couldn’t renew the domain name because their records show it belongs to someone other than my User ID! Naturally I’ve tried to contact Registerfly to try and figure out what’s going on and can’t get through. The several emails I’ve sent have so far gone unanswered and when I called in during business hours last week I was on hold for 35 minutes (with a helpful message repeating itself every minute telling me how many people were still ahead of me and how many minutes I’d already been waiting) and when I finally got to the head of the line I was suddenly put into voicemail – with a message that the Voice Mailbox was full!
Right now, I don’t know where things stand or even if Registerfly is still a going concern or not. Supposedly I have a month’s grace period to renew my domain after it expires, but right now I’m not feeling too confident about anything. I don’t want to see this blog overnight turn into a site selling foot creams or discount medications (not that there’s anything wrong with that), and I don’t want to move my domain registration business to GoDaddy because of their advertising.
Here are my questions; I’d appreciate comments from anyone who has any information or advice:
- How do I go about moving my domain registration from one vendor to another, and are there other companies out there other than Registerfly or GoDaddy that anyone can recommend?
- If my domain name should truly be lost, can I still preserve my URL and, especially, my on-line archives? (I’m in the process of manually transferring these to my hard-drive, which takes up time that I have precious little of right now).
- If I end up changing my domain name and URL, is there a simple way to leave a “forwarding address”?
Thanks, folks.
Update:
I’ve got a bad feeling about this. There’s actually a website devoted to problems with Registerfly. Looks like I can kiss my original domain name good-bye. Now I just need to figure out if I can get a new domain name and still keep this URL!
NW, okay, first of all it might be easier for you to just call me on my cell sometime and I’ll walk you through it all. But in summary…
1) It’s relatively easy….if you have the necessary information.
When you registered your domain you should have gotten a Transfer key. It’s basically to ensure that an unauthorized party doesn’t transfer your domain. Can you log into your account at RegisterFly to get that?
Also, your domain can’t be “locked”. If you don’t know if it is, it probably isn’t. As it’s pretty rare unless you changed it.
Otherwise, there are approximately 5 billion companies out that that do domain registration for you.
Most hosts offer it as one of their services. My domain used to be registered with tucows, whom I had no complaints about…it’s just easier now to have it registered via my host (one control panel vs two). You can find them at:
http://resellers.tucows.com/wholesale_services/domain_names/
Otherwise if this process really scares you I can register the domain for you at my host and just point it to wherever you want. Downside to that is I control your domain, not you. You know me well enough by now that that prospect should scare the bejesus out of you!
2) Your domain IS your URL, basically. Your on-line archives are fine, they are still accessible via your sites IP address. All the URL is, is a name, which gets translated (via DNS servers) by a web browser into an IP address, which points to the server your site is hosted on.
So basically when you registered your domain you are just telling the world, heh, if you ever want to go to site http://www.domainname.com, it’s located at the server on IP address 1.2.3.4.
3) If you don’t control your old domain, there isn’t really a clean way of doing a “forwarding address”.
I guess considering you are using powerblogs.com I’m not entirely understanding your problem though. Hence why it might be easier just to give me a call and we’ll hammer out the problem.
Will do. From what I’ve read about Registerfly, I may not be able to get my domain name “out”. Fortunately it’s not a name I need for business like so many of their client-victims. I was going to change my DNS this year anyway; I’ll email you the details I have and then we can talk.
Yeah, I’ve since did a little research on what’s going on over there and it’s not pretty.
From the sounds of it your domain is probably locked, which regardless of any other information means you probably can’t transfer it until that is resolved.
And then I’m also slightly confused as why you have a domain registered at all. Am I mistaken in that your URL is thenightwriterblog.powerblogs.com??? You shouldn’t have had to register that as far as I am aware?
And your DNS shouldn’t need to change unless you plan on changing hosts, which would mean leaving powerblogs.com.
Or am I completely misunderstanding how powerblogs.com works?
All will be made clear (I hope) when I email. Thanks for the help!